Channel swim 4 – Time to get serious

So… It’s been a brilliant season with lots of firsts for me, and I’ve found it all too easy to avoid thinking hard about the swim next year.

A few years back Barney asked me when I was planning to start training for my second ride100 – I’d done a lot of training the year before, and felt I’d spent a lot of time maintaining a fitness level. I told him I had a plan to start about eight weeks before the event. To this day I’m scarred by the memory of him absolutely wetting himself laughing as I told him ‘I didn’t want to peak too early’.

That event did not go well – I finished, but it was very far from pretty.

Now triathlon season is finally and definitely over, and with less than nine months to go I’m starting to shift a laserbeam focus onto what I need to do over the winter to maximise my chances of a successful swim.

Channel swimming has been all over the news and TV for the last few weeks. Sarah Thomas is a superhuman who has just become the first person to swim the channel four times non stop. Unsurprisingly, I’ve had a more or less daily stream of people asking what’s wrong with me that I’m only planning one ever since, which is less amusing than you’d imagine even the first time. I cannot imagine the physical and mental make up that let her demolish something as hard as this.

With the opposite approach (no spoilers) Sink Or Swim followed a bunch of non swimming celebrities raising money for Stand up to cancer who trained for 12 weeks to swim the channel in a relay. Understandably they found this very very challenging at points. While I don’t have some of the same issues they were dealing with, there was a few moments that shook me up during the programs. For example, although 300 people attempt the swim each year I had no idea that only 60 were successful; the thought that after all the months and years of training, from focused and experienced endurance athletes only 20% make it came as a real shock.

Based on all of this sudden publicity I’m really glad I’m already booked in for next year as I suspect there will be a lot of people prodded into action and slots are going to be in very short supply.

Its time to get serious. If I’m honest, it’s probably a bit past time to get serious, but at least this time I’m not worried about peaking too early.

This week I officially retained a coach for the event. Hannah is an amazing swimmer and trainer and really cares about people. I was already completely confident in my choice before we sat down and she shared with me that she’s on a long term training plan for her own channel swim, but is struggling with a sensitivity to cold water.

I was recently on holiday in Brittany and forced myself into the Atlantic every day for a swim. The water was breathtakingly cold on entry, but eventually each day I got used to it and was able swim more or less usually. I consoled myself with the thought that so long as the sea temperature here was around 12 degrees, I knew I’d be ok. When I got back to the internet I looked up the seasonal temperatures. 18 degrees.

That was not what I needed to see.

Hannah couldn’t possibly have a more different body type to me but we both quickly homed in on acclimatisation as being my biggest challenge – with a likely sea temp in June of 12 degrees, I’ve been genuinely more worried about this than I am the distance.

I had also met another successful channel swimmer a couple of months back, also called Hannah. As we sat down to chat I was struggling to reconcile the small slim lady in front of me with my mental picture of a endurance swimmer, but quickly recalibrated as she delivered a steely no nonsense recap of her swim. She had a twinkle in her eye as she told me I should put my wetsuit away and only swim skins from here on in and that I should even restrict myself to only icy cold showers between now and the swim.

I was shivering just thinking about it, which suggested it was good, if unwanted advice.

Hannah the coach concurred. She told me not to start with a daily icy blast of water but to start dropping the temperature to get to ‘Do you want to build a snowman’ as quickly as possible. This is terrible news for me as I love a hot shower and often crash out in a scalding bath after any remotely tough or muddy event. I’ve already turned the shower dial to the previously undiscovered ‘Cold enough to scream’ setting, and expect to hit ‘Incipient Frostbite’ towards the end of this week.

My son who shares the bathroom and can be spectacularly inattentive is not enjoying the experience.

I had done a few skin swims, but races kept coming up that I was able to make excuse to wear a wetsuit for. Hannah’s drawing me up a training plan, but I think a big focus is to get me in for sea swims and OW skin swims as often as possible. She’s flagged for me some groups on Facebook. I’ve signed up and am keen to get out to sea over the winter. Soon.

We also discussed training camps abroad, concerned about the early swim date blocking us from sea training in the build up. I’d rather not spend the money, but at the same time I don’t want to penny pinch and wind up failing. I’m checking a number of possibilities out, so I should have something in the diary soon.

My big focus has to be just getting miles in at the right temperature. Hannah the swimmer is part of a group who cruise up and down a local river. They do it every day of the year and apparently half non wetsuit swim. I’d been part of their WhatsApp group for a while and they seemed a brilliant bunch, if obviously deranged. This is how I found myself standing on the bank of the Thames wearing speedos under a Dryrobe early on a gloomy and rainy Sunday morning. We’d been unsure if the swim would go ahead as thunderstorms had been predicted, but the river looked good, and although dark and grey there were no signs of thunder, and perhaps more relevantly, lightning.

I was waiting for Ian, who was going to swim with me. He appeared bang on time on a mountain bike also wearing a Dryrobe (I think they are probably worth their weight in hot chocolate for this sort of thing). I’m not even remotely sure it’s safe to ride a bike in one, but he was clearly well practiced. After the briefest of chats where we quickly introduced ourselves, he established I’d swum in a river before and shared that the temperature was about 14 degrees. We both stripped down to swim trunks and plunged down the slipway, going from chatting tea in hand to swim ready in the space of about ten seconds. As we strode in he mentioned the flow might be a problem but again, it looked fine to me.

After the cold shock in France, I did have a little bit of trepidation that the temperature was going to be an issue.

Walking in, it really didn’t feel that cold, but its clear you don’t hang around acclimatising when the temperature starts to drop. As Ian slipped into the fastest breaststroke seen outside of a championship event, I kicked into crawl and immediately gasped as the cold water hit my face. I knew I’d be struggling to control my breathing so pulled back into breaststroke to follow him across the river dunking my face repeatedly as I swam before trying again more successfully with the crawl as we turned up stream.

The entry point is in a basin, so you don’t really notice any flow at all until you start to move – when the river suddenly narrows you find your progress against the banks slowing dramatically while the water continues to race past your face. I now understood Ian’s careful assessment before we’d begun. Ian (still breaststroking) quickly suggested I hug the bank while he stayed more to the middle of the river to allow him to work harder and keep warm. I need to do speed work more than I thought!

I could feel a colder layer of water against my skin that usual. It’s hard to put into words, but imagine you were swimming in warm water in a wetsuit you’d filled with icy water before the start. No, I don’t know why you’d want to do this either, but it’s a simile so just go with it. I don’t think I was actually trapping a supercold layer – I think it’s just the mind being used to wearing a wetsuit and struggling to process the lack of the usual sensation.

Although I had my breathing under control I was still puffing more than I expected. Part of this was chasing Ian, but I think the colder water did contribute to this. Aside from that, once we were in a couple of minutes into the swim I stopped even noticing the temperature at all. It’s also possible it was just a little anxiety over doing something unusual for the first time.

We both settled in to a hard slog upstream. With a lot of rain over the last few days the water was brown and visibility was, although better than I’d expected, limited at maybe a meter. I made a mental note to order a non polarised pair of goggles as my existing pair tripped me up for the second time this year. I had no idea where I was going for a chunk of the swim. It took us 23 minutes to haul ourselves to the turnaround point, a flagpole 750m away. I suspect I may have covered nearly double that distance in the water. A quick grin, and we turned around and covered the reverse distance in half that.

Soon, Ian was waiting back at the slipway as I sprinted in behind him. I was elated as it had felt pretty good from a temperature point of view. I’ve decided there’s a massive difference between jumping into the atlantic on a sundrenched french coast on a scorching hot day and striding into the Thames on a cold and drizzly autumn morning. I’m really glad I’ve started now, and I can follow the temperature down as winter starts to bite, hopefully the gradual decline will be something that makes it all a little easier.

My buzz lasted all day. I can’t wait to get in again. I think I need to try to join the river crew twice a week between now and spring, which is going to be a logistical challenge, but one I hope I can make more often than not.

Now, I’m more scared about the distance than I am the temperature. I’m not sure that’s an improvement.

Next: Channel Swim 5: Swimming in the dark
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